Subject: HAB: An Unhappy Marriage
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 12:50:47 


Dear List,

I have just read James Bohman's essay *Habermas, Marxism and social theory* 
in the recent Dews' anthology _Habermas: A critical reader_ ( Blackwell, 
1999); and have difficulties reconciling Bohman's statements re Habermas's 
explicit borrowings from Luhmann's version of a social systems functionalism 
with Habermas's extensively documented aversion to Luhmann's 
*metabiological* social analyses.

Is there an alternative reading of the Habermas/Luhmann debate which I am 
unaware of? Any pointers please? I have only just got over my obsession with 
an implicit cybernetic-systems motif in Habermas's 1970s work; which I now 
realise is annulled by JH's emphasis on the contingencies of the generation 
of social movements.

Now there's Bohman's connecting up of Luhmann and Habermas. What next? A 
reading of JH as a neo-Nietzschean :-)

MattP



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